I
had to smile when I caught NBC’s September 9th evening newscast. Featured
was a map of the United States decorated with red circles for every
locale receiving reluctant evacuees from the devastated City of New
Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. By that date, the final
destinations for thousands of displaced persons was pretty well decided,
a total that included, no doubt, many of the criminals who raped,
pillaged, and plundered, but didn’t get caught.

For
all the howling against the Administration by the likes of Senators
Teddy Kennedy (D-MA) and Harry Reid (N-NV), the race-bating by pundits
like Clarence Page and Jesse Jackson, and the phony outrage of TV
commentators comfortably ensconced in New York and Boston, I realized
there was something terribly odd about what I was seeing. Or, what
I was not seeing, to be more precise. There was not a single
red circle for the States of Massachusetts, Connecticut or, indeed,
any points north of Washington, DC.

Why,
I wondered, were not the playgrounds of the truly rich, such
as Martha’s Vineyard, Nantucket, and Kennebunkport, opening their
arms to the destitute? Or offering jobs, maybe in repairs or repainting,
now that the tourist season was over. Were not there a few rooms in
their relatively uncrowded hospitals for a few dysentery patients
or rape victims? And where were the strident calls for the “special
needs” offspring of the impoverished at prestigious prep schools like
and Phillips Academy at Andover or La Lumiere?

I
see indignant mouths lip-syncing: “When pigs fly!”

Well,
you see, the “proper” facilities and “resources” are not available
at these locations and institutions. (Of course not.) But…they would
be happy to organize a rock concert -- provided the hallowed event
takes place “down there” somewhere.

Ever
so much easier, it is, to throw money at somebody else’s problem,
once one is safely isolated from it. And easier yet to dispatch somebody
else’s money -- preferably individuals making $80,000-$200,000:
the bourgeoisie the left so loves to categorize as “the wealthy”?
America’s bourgeoisie are the upwardly-mobile folks struggling to
get their kids away from schools that teach homosexuality in kindergarten;
the families juggling mortgages to live in neighborhoods where drive-by
shootings, rapes and abductions are not the norm; and the couples
sacrificing for their children’s college tuitions instead of relying
on family ties and associations, as per the Martha’s Vineyard set
that can effortlessly afford all the perks of privilege, many times
over.

So,
the multi-millionaires and billionaires coordinate fundraisers for
harried mothers and fathers spending their own discretionary hours
in lines for groceries, dry cleaning, motor vehicle inspections, etc.,
while their betters in the Hamptons languish on their estates, both
here and abroad, leaving such nuisance assignments to the hired help
-- low-paid employees who, thanks to legislation endorsed by their
betters, will have zero chance of steering their own youngsters to
brighter educational futures.

It
is said that all politics are local, and perhaps there is still a
kernel of truth to that.

But
thanks to our increasingly socialist mentality, carefully inculcated
over years of politically correct, Marxist-inspired schooling, most
people now look to the federal government as a first resort, hollering
about “local control” and the 10th Amendment only when it suits them.
Consequently, regardless of who is at the national helm when disaster
strikes, inevitable bureaucratic bungling will result in big headaches
for any leader unlucky enough to inhabit the White House, dashing
their Party’s hopes of a leg-up in the next election. Louisiana Governor
Kathleen Babineaux Blanco’s dithering on a request for federal emergency
management assistance, New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin’s discombobulated
cluelessness in coordinating an evacuation, the Orleans Levee District
board’s misplaced priorities in allegedly frittering away millions
on casinos while diverting funds from important infrastructure and
safety projects (such as the levee) to relatives and cronies -- none
of that mattered in the end.

Katrina
hit the morning of August 29th. Within 48 hours, tens of thousands
of individuals who ignored the mandatory evacuation order were crushed
into grossly inadequate quarters -- the convention center and Superdome
-- which, in turn, became a staging area for murder, rape, garbage,
“open bathrooms,” and predators. This doesn’t count the looters on
the streets of New Orleans, many of whom deliberately flouted the
evacuation orders, envisioning a city ripe for plundering.

The
some 500 deaths, financial losses and the crime wave that ensued have
been deemed the Administration’s fault -- most specifically, President
George W. Bush. He will dutifully go on national television to redeem
his beleaguered administration. To the President went the blame for
Louisiana’s errant levee money, as he stood accused of spending state
monies on Iraq, which was not even possible! No one but reporter Joyce
Howard Price bothered to look at the role of environmental extremist
groups like the Sierra Club in creating legislation and initiating
lawsuits that for some 20 years blocked critical levee and other hurricane-fortification
projects [Read].
In environmentalists’ logic, of course, it was more important to save
wetlands and bugs than humans, as humans are viewed as the real enemy
threatening the planet.

To
President Bush also went responsibility for failing to dispatch Federal
Emergency Management Administration teams straightaway to Louisiana
prior to a specific request by the Governor (who now admits her error).
Sacked FEMA Director Michael D. Brown, who opted to place his teams
in staging areas until called (as per standard procedure), served
as the scapegoat. Even the hurricane itself was “W’s” fault, according
to a C+ science student and former presidential candidate named Al
Gore, because Mr. Bush refused to sign the Kyoto Treaty in November
2004 -- proving exactly what? Well, that the President was unconvinced
of the validity of a highly questionable theory called global warming
-- and his refusal to be railroaded into signing a flawed accord somehow
caused a hurricane in the year 2005! Now, there’s logic for you!

As
Hurricane Rita approaches television commentators are busy reviewing
how global warming may be playing a part in the “new” wave of monster
storms, thereby conferring “factual” status on the theory of global
warming. For a highly readable overview of just how dubious this theory
is, I highly recommend Michael Creighton’s latest novel, State
of Fear, which is chock full of footnotes citing scientific papers
that set forth the pros and cons of the debate.

New
Orleans Mayor Nagin seems a nice enough guy -- humble, self-effacing,
respectful. He praised the President’s efforts and faulted his state,
in a very public way -- on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” and gave particular
kudos to Lieutenant General Russel Honore who came in to restore order,
dubbing Honore “a John Wayne dude.”

Unfortunately,
being a “nice guy” is not the same as being qualified, a point that
the Democrats were quick to level, with some justification, at former
FEMA Director Brown (despite the fact the State failed to call in
his agency until it was too late).

Dramatic
visuals show hundreds of school buses nearly submerged in their parking
spaces. These, combined with some 550 water-logged city buses, could
have been used to evacuate the city 14 hours ahead of the storm, as
is being done in evacuating people from Galveston. As with Hurricane
Rita, experts all predicted a direct or near-direct hit by Katrina.

Senator
Mary L. Landrieu (D-LA), probably now regrets her comment (picked
up by the Washington Times September 12th, “President
'made things happen',” about it being “hard enough getting people
to work on a sunny day, let alone getting them out of the city in
front of a hurricane.” But Mayor Nagin backs her up, complaining that
enough drivers could barely be found to take stranded people to the
Superdome.

Had
it been New York’s Rudy Giuliani in Louisiana in August instead of
Mayor Nagin or Kathleen Blanco, those school buses and public buses
would likely have been gassed up and ready, drivers at the wheel,
and most of the stragglers perched in their seats, willing or not,
some 12 hours before the storm. Architectural experts would have been
quickly dispatched prior to landfall via F-18s, if necessary, to assess
the viability of the Superdome as a backup for a Category 4 hurricane,
and the National Guard would have blackened the sky with helicopters
both before and after the deluge.

Just
how much rope must the liberal media have before it hangs itself?
In its effort to publicize, as widely and as graphically as possible,
the horrific images of misery usually reserved for Third World countries,
what they showed instead were the results of 40 years of entitlement
programs aimed at “solving poverty”; 40 years of relaxed school standards
and dumbed-down curricula intended to “keep kids in school”; and 40
years of prosecution-proof, rehabilitative approaches to law-breaking
in the name of “reducing crime and delinquency” -- all progeny of
a 60’s-era liberal-leftism that has now become institutionalized.
The phrase “just like a Third World country” kept surfacing because
residents who dismissed the mandatory evacuation order, in effect,
reverted to Third World behavior (excepting, of course, the disabled,
the hospitalized and the elderly, who should have been the first ones
airlifted to safety, as is being done with Hurricane Rita). What our
television screens gave us were scenes we have seen repeatedly in
places like Haiti, Somalia, and Uganda.

For
me, the dismal pictorials from New Orleans generated some long-repressed
memories of young “boat people” in my classrooms during the 1970s,
when the influx of Vietnamese refugees was at its height. Regardless
of your opinion of the Vietnam War, it was nevertheless true that
these children had suffered traumas of a magnitude scarcely imaginable,
even in New Orleans. Some had watched their parents disemboweled,
and worse, in front of them (by well-funded aggressors who recruited
and appealed to the jealousies of ideologues and opportunists). Others
didn’t know where their family members were, and realized they would
probably never find them. Many had spent weeks and months on boats,
their teeth rotted and their bodies emaciated from lack of nutrition
and exposure, from being crammed together with access to neither medicine,
dry clothes, diapers (yes, there were babies) or hygiene products.
Once on American shores, they encountered a culture and language so
unlike their own that they might as well have landed on another planet.
Many expected to be arrested and tortured yet again. The mental health
industry, for the most part, had not yet pounced upon the prospects
presented by “victimhood,” so it was the rare refugee who received
“counseling services,” much less a diagnosis of post-traumatic-stress
disorder or the questionable benefit of antidepressant drugs.

The
U.S. government dispersed such the refugees to states throughout the
country.

Some
of their children landed in my classrooms. The stories they told --
when they could bear to reveal them -- were beyond horrendous. But
among the refugee community itself, there was no mention of rape,
stealing and murder, either in transit or once they arrived to our
shores. They did not engage in mass temper tantrums to vent their
understandable angst, nor did the children use their situation as
an excuse to slack off in school.

The
first thing most refugees told me they did was to locate other refugees
in whatever community they wound up situated and start pooling their
resources.

Anything
they received, either from the government or from charitable organizations,
was placed in a “pool,” and the universal reaction was gratitude.
But their goal was self-sufficiency, not a handout, even from nonprofits
and churches. Their first purchases, after food, were dictionaries
-- Vietnamese-English or even French-English, if that was all they
could find. Several of my “boat students” could neither speak nor
understand a word of English when they walked into my class, but by
the second semester, they were “acing” their exams and out-performing
the American kids, regardless of ethnicity.

Their
English-speaking peers were suspicious. Some thought the “boat kids”
cheated, and even I had occasional doubts. I remember a particular
instance when most youngsters had left my class to watch an exhibition
basketball game -- except for the Vietnamese pupils, who did not have
the one dollar to purchase a ticket. It was a perfect opportunity
to ask “Tam” up to my desk. Tam was a 13-year-old boy who looked about
9. He unfailingly made A’s, even with his English-pronunciation problems.

I
had a paperback in my brief case, so I pulled it out, knowing Tam
would not be familiar with it. I opened to a random paragraph and
asked him to tell me the part of speech (noun, pronoun, verb, adjective,
adverb, etc.) for every single word in one of the longer paragraphs.
Tam examined the selection for about two minutes, then proceeded to
correctly identify every word -- including terms like “kitchen sink,”
both of which would normally have been nouns, but not in this context
(the first was an adjective and the second a noun). This was the same
little boy who still used a dictionary to look up words during the
lesson. When I would stop and ask, “Tam, do you understand?” he would
nod in the affirmative, and continue to hurriedly find words as I
spoke them.

This
was also the same youngster who weighed about 50 pounds and had lost
nearly all of his permanent teeth.

“Tam,
how are you able to do this?” I
exclaimed, bewildered.

“Oh,”
he said, “study very hard. American school is easy if I study.”

“Did
you ever study English in Vietnam,” I asked.

He
laughed ruefully. “No, no school for me in Vietnam.”

“Well,”
I told him. “Come back during my free period and we will work on your
pronunciation. Maybe you can learn to express your verbs better, too.”

“Oh,
t’ank you, t’ank you. I come back every day.”

Wow,
I thought. If this kid doesn’t get killed by a jealous classmate
first, he’s really going to make it.

By
contrast, most of the American pupils, including the ones getting
reduced or free lunches, spend their educational time strutting around
like peacocks; and their parents’ money (entitlement and earned) on
ridiculous get-ups and expensive gadgets while complaining they cannot
afford a pen. Only the labels have changed today -- it is MP-3 players,
cell phones, and Game-boys. And youngsters have become far more brazen
than they were in the 1970s -- far beyond merely ignoring their lessons,
swearing at teachers, and disrupting classes, and truancy.

Hopefully,
the younger evacuees from New Orleans have received a wake-up call.

In
an effort by many companies set up job fairs at various evacuation
centers, recruiters discovered that most of the displaced persons,
both young and adult, are not merely low-skilled, but unskilled (as
per NBC’s “Dateline, also September 9th).

For
all its faults, this nation has provided the means for a child
to obtain a rudimentary education, providing one is serious
and motivated. All a kid has to do is show up, bring a pencil, and
turn in a paper now and then to earn a grade. Even though it should
not be up to the teacher to motivate a student, most try. Even though
schools have become, in many ways, obstacle courses to learning --
awash in faddish methodologies, psychobabble, and constant interruptions
-- it is still possible for a committed student to “tune out” the
nonsense and benefit from what substance is offered. I refer the reader
to the story of Dr. Ben Carson, the top-drawer black neurologist who
(thanks to his extraordinary mother) overcame poverty and want and
went on to separate the first Siamese twins, among other pioneering
work.

The
values of self-sufficiency and individualism are no longer inculcated,
and we call the result “compassion.” Individual thought has been replaced
with group-think, and we call the result “consensus.” But neither
able-bodied dependency nor peer-centeredness is a trait that free
republic can long afford to tolerate.

Group-think
centers on popularity and trendiness; they thrive not on principle,
but upon the kind of “mob mentality” and “tribalism” so prevalent
among Third World countries -- in direct opposition to the kind of
individual liberty inspired by the Framers of our Constitution. “Mobocracies”
subsist on sound-bites and attention-grabbing visuals, never on substantive
discourse. We forget that the appeal of Marxist socialism was that
it favored groups over individuals; at the top is the “elite,” which
is answerable to no one.

What
Americans saw on their TV screens with Katrina was the triumph of
the tribalist mindset, a “mobocracy” -- which was remediable by what?
The National Guard, and a no-nonsense guy named Lieutenant General
Russel Honore who was sent in to take charge.

What
does that tell us about the future of this country, when only the
military, in effect, can be brought in to direct out-of-control masses?

Once
the displaced, unskilled denizens of cot-lined rescue havens are housed
in various cities, we can expect, over the course of a few months’
frustration with a government that cannot fulfill their needs and
desires fast enough in the wake of both Katrina and Rita, that many
will begin trolling the “bourgeoisie” neighborhoods for more “things”
-- and for excitement.

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The
truly wealthy, the elite, with their summer “cottages” at Martha’s
Vineyard and Kennebunkport, and long history of leftist idealism tempered
by none of its realities, know this is true. That’s why you will see
no evacuation centers there.

Beverly Eakman is an Educator, 9 years: 1968-1974,
1979-1981. Specialties: English and Literature.

Science Editor, Technical Writer and Editor-in-Chief
of official newspaper, National Aeronautics and Space Administration,
1974-1979. Technical piece, "David, the Bubble Baby," picked up by popular
press and turned into a movie starring John Travolta.

Chief speech writer, National Council for Better
Education, 1984-1986; for the late Chief Justice Warren E. Burger, Commission
on the Bicentennial of the US Constitution, 1986-1987; for the Voice of
America Director, 1987-1989; and for U.S. Department of Justice, Gerald
R. Regier, 1991-1993.